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Inside the Talks: Why FBI Negotiations at Waco Collapsed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For fifty-one days, FBI negotiators kept David Koresh talking — then the tactical commanders took over. This episode examines the power struggle inside the FBI that ended any chance of a peaceful resolution at Waco.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what's still unresolved, thirty years later. The FBI had negotiators on the phone with David Koresh for fifty-one days.
When the ATF's catastrophic February twenty-eighth raid ended, the FBI took over. That's where Gary Noesner comes in.
To understand why the negotiations were so difficult, you have to understand what Koresh was working from. He wasn't operating on a normal risk-reward calculation.
The tactical commanders saw it differently. To them, every day was a day the Branch Davidians were resupplying, reorganizing, and reinforcing Koresh's control over the people inside.
Around the four-week mark, Gary Noesner was reassigned. He didn't resign.
By early April, the FBI's command structure had essentially concluded that negotiations had reached a dead end. Koresh kept reinterpreting his conditions.
The fire is where accountability fractures entirely. The government's position is that Branch Davidians started the fire themselves, that it was a deliberate act by Koresh or his senior followers, possibly planned as a final apocalyptic gesture.
Thirty-five people came out during the standoff. That's not a small number.
The failure at Waco didn't stay inside the compound. Timothy McVeigh visited the siege in person.
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